With the advent and huge popularity of image scanners, video capture cards and digital still and video cameras it is common for people to store a large number of photographs, and other documents on personal computers and other computer related devices. There is a need for users of these devices to be able to access, organize and navigate through their documents.
Over the last decade, many industries and academies have concentrated their efforts on developing technologies for facilitating automatic or semi-automatic annotation of multimedia content. As a result, a number of prototypes have been developed for demonstrating technologies such as automatic labelling using image processing, time or content-based automatic clustering and metadata propagation. User Interface experts have also largely explored the problem of annotating content efficiently, for instance through drag-and-drop strategies or through the use of dynamic recommendation.
Metadata thereby opens a new perspective for navigating audiovisual content. In particular, descriptive metadata makes it possible to explore a collection of images through their semantic relationships, rather than solely using the chronological approach.
The term “annotation” as used herein refers to voice recordings, keywords, comments, notes or any type of descriptive metadata that can be attached to a document by a user. An annotation may comprise one or more category-value pairs, for instance category=“Location”, value=“India”. These category-value pairs may be user-defined category-value pairs. When a new category-value pair is assigned to a document, the category-value pair is simply added to a list of category-value pairs (also referred to as “annotations”) for the document.
Metadata-based navigation is known in the form of narrative systems for browsing collections of keyword-annotated content. For example, the “automatist storyteller” systems rely on the concept of activation-values assigned both to keywords and content. When a keyword or a piece of content is clicked on, an activation value associated with the keyword or piece of content is raised, while the activation value of other content is decreased. Activation values thereby provide a relative value system, which serves as the basis for both an automatic content selection algorithm and graphical display.
Various graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are also known for providing a large-scale picture of a collection of audiovisual items that allow a user to navigate through metadata relationships between items.
Automatic methods for constructing audio “playlists” of similar songs limiting abrupt transitions have also been developed. Such methods use a music similarity graph expressed as links between various artists, albums, and songs in order to automatically construct a set of coordinate vectors for use in inferring similarity between various pieces of music.
A need exists for an improved method of generating an ordered sequence of items from a collection of items.